[yt-dev] Announcing: yt 3.0 alpha 2

[Matthew Turk]

Hi everyone,

We're proud to announce the second ALPHA release of yt 3.0.  yt has
recently transitioned to a time-based release plan (
https://ytep.readthedocs.org/en/latest/YTEPs/YTEP-0008.html ) and this
is the second scheduled alpha of 3.0.  No date for a "final" release
has yet been set.

The yt 2.5 codebase, and further updates in the 2.x series, will be
supported for a considerable amount of time and you do not need to
upgrade.

= yt 3.0?! =

yt 3.0 represents a new direction forward for yt: getting rid of all
the underlying assumptions that data needs to be sectioned off into
nice little grid patches.  This includes supporting Octree codes
natively (NMSU-ART and RAMSES), eventual support for SPH codes, and
even opaque data structures where the data is extremely large (ARTIO).
 We're even planning support for natively handling cylindrical and
spherical coordinates.

More: http://blog.yt-project.org/post/WhatsUpWith30.html

However, this *is* an alpha release.  Not all of the existing codes
have been ported to 3.0.

Additionally, this release benefits from the technical and
non-technical contributions from many new people.  yt is developed in
the context of a community of contributors, and with the push toward a
new architecture, we aim to expand that community considerably.  In
particular, this release has considerably benefited from contributions
from many new individuals.

= Getting It! =

To try out yt 3.0, you can now pull from the main yt repository,
update to the yt-3.0 branch, and rebuild your extensions.  Or, if you
would like to create a new, safely sectioned off environment, simply
re-run the normal "development" install script after changing the
variable BRANCH to "yt-3.0".

If you would like to try out yt 3.0 and are having trouble, please
write to the yt-users mailing list for assistance.

The yt 3.0 install script may also work, which can be obtained by
executing these commands:

  wget http://hg.yt-project.org/yt/raw/yt-3.0/doc/install_script.sh
  bash install_script.sh

= Examples =

New functionality can be seen in IPython notebooks available on the yt
data Hub.  In particular, these notebooks demonstrate many of the
functionality that has been added for PKDgrav, Gasoline, Gadget, Enzo,
and RAMSES.

 * Enzo: https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/tzeizy
 * Gadget: https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/abu5nb
 * RAMSES: https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/5zw7qn
 * PKDgrav: https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/mp46a6
 * Gasoline: https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/dfncvy

(Apologies for the SSL warning on the Hub site.)

= Reporting Problems =

If you test out yt 3.0 we want to hear if it DID or DID NOT work!
Feedback is crucial at this time. yt-users and yt-dev are both good
forums for discussion, asking questions, and reporting problems.  Lots
of things have changed on the backend, but we have attempted to
minimize the user-facing changes.

To report a bug please go here:

https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/issues/new

Note that you will not receive updates if you are not logged in when
you create the bug.

= What's Next? =

The next alpha release (3.0a3) is scheduled to be released on July 15,
2013, but development can be monitored either at
http://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt-3.0 or in the main yt repository
under the named branch "yt-3.0".  We hope to have ready for inclusion
additional improvements to Octree codes, a units implementation for
arrays, a field naming scheme overhaul, and further robustness for
particle codes.  We also are hoping to include the first attempts to
apply SPH smoothing kernels to SPH particles.

We anticipate that the next alpha release will involve more invasive
changes to the array handling and units handling code, and may include
a large number of field renaming operations.  Aliases to old fields
will be provided at that time.

Many bug fixes from the mainline of 2.X development have not been
merged into the yt-3.0 repository.  Bringing these bugfixes in will
occur sometime in the next few weeks.

If you'd like to participate in yt development, please stop by #yt on
irc.freenode.net ( http://yt-project.org/irc.html ) or yt-dev (
http://lists.spacepope.org/listinfo.cgi/yt-dev-spacepope.org ), or
submit a pull request on BitBucket.

Thanks very much,

Matt, on behalf of the yt development team